Thinking of some ways to make interactions with complex xrefs quicker. When doing operations that currently highlight with the light grey color, could we get an option(s) to do something along the lines of the the following to help speed up things? Just some random ideas here real quick.

- Not do any highlighting of xrefs at all when selected. Usually when picking at an xref there is some other indicator that tells us it's an xref like the menu, Info bars, Context menu. If this was implemented, maybe a highlight button could be added to the Identify menu for xrefs that if clicked would highlight the xref like it does now if the user wants to see whats contained in the xref. - show text boxes instead of actual text when highlighted- don't show/highlight hatch patterns/fills- other ideas?

When trying to Ctrl+Right Click on a complex xref, it often has to be redrawn to the screen multiple times which requires us to continue holding the CTRL key down for a long time which I think may be filling up a buffer or something as sometimes the program goes into a program not responding state which looses tract of the command and doesn't display the menu when Datacad does start to respond again.

I think this would be a good enhancement as selecting xrefs often "takes time" whilst it is highlighted etc. Maybe some options to consider could include:

1. crosshair changes colour and/or linetype when over an xref,2. the text wording "xref' is displayed on the crosshair similar to how Show X and Y is displayed when toggled on in Grids3. the xref displays a bounding box outline only when the crosshair moves over it

All good thoughts. Would the addition of an XRef Display options, similar to fills, bitmaps, text, dimensions, etc., where the Xref would display as a bounding box instead of the full detail be an option?

jimgoodman wrote:Would the addition of an XRef Display options, similar to fills, bitmaps, text, dimensions, etc., where the Xref would display as a bounding box instead of the full detail be an option?

Sounds good to me.

Think I would want ID'ing associated hatch to highlight the boundary rather than the whole pattern also.

Or a whole new hardware accelerated display engine where it's fast enough to handle everything thrown at it (just kidding Dave, but not really, sort of)

Adding to Josh's email of Jan. 9: Whilst working on a building floor plan, I went to rotate an xclip of another part of the building and floor level, and it took about 12-15 seconds to select the xref (which included smart entities, 2D linework and symbols). After selecting the rotation point and then somewhere to rotate the xclip by, the screen 'flashed' and the menu icons across the side and top disappeared leaving only the grey background, 'not responding' was displayed across the top of the file path and the xclip highlighted in light grey ready for rotating. The movement was that jittery; a light tap on the mouse would send it across the screen, with each slight movement on the mouse having the xclip continuously redraw itself.

As with Josh's email, it becomes challenging when attempting to select some entities such as xrefs, xclips or symbols prior to further editing such as move, rotate etc. It becomes even harder to 'release' it from the mouse as it seems to get stuck in an endless refreshing of the xclip. Importing SKP have the same issues and are often hard to place in a drawing and release from the mouse.

Don't fall off your chair, but I've still got a working version of DataCAD Visual Realty 2.0 (vintage 1995) that runs on Win10Pro. I've just loaded a large file into it and can move and rotate it effortlessly as though it's only a handful of lines. I then loaded it in DataCAD and although not as slow or jittery as the xclip, it is still sluggish.

There must be some bottleneck somewhere in how DataCAD handles and temporarily stores the selected information prior and during editing? I believe improving this area for selection and speed enhancements would be a great advantage. ....I recall in the 'early' days having to create a ramdrive in MTEC....is it possible to have a modern equivalent to allow rapid movement and editing of selected data?

Going back to VR2.0 - it appears when rotating or moving the large model file, only a portion of the entities are shown which must dramatically reduce the number of entities actually redisplayed, hence it rotates smoothly. Maybe DataCAD could work in a similar manner and only display entities over a certain length (user option toggle?). Other suggestions could be the option that all symbols, text, dims are displayed as a bounding box, smart walls only display the inner and outer wall line, etc. Using Max. Entities to filter the total number displayed doesn't really work in this situation as the total number in an xclip or xref or imported SKP etc. aren't known at the time of selection (which often takes time on when selecting large files).